Contributed by Scott Chambers, director of program management, Tempest Utility Consulting
Incident command systems (ICS) began gaining traction with the utility industry in the early 2010s after several major storms, including Hurricanes Irene and Sandy, battered the Northeastern United States. These events spotlighted how electric utilities had to dramatically improve their response and restoration.
Anthony Hurley, a retired vice president of operations for Jersey Central Power & Light, worked closely with regulators during that period in developing FirstEnergy’s ICS program. According to Hurley, there was a “huge upside” to implementing ICS, including in how it enabled his company to maximize resources and manage costs by helping identify resource needs faster, more closely tracking restoration, and assigning the right crews with the right equipment to the job sites earlier.
The improvements to restoration times, financial controls, and enhancing the effectiveness of communications to customers, regulators and other stakeholders led to JCP&L being awarded J.D. Powers recognition for customer satisfaction improvements. Better coordination through ICS also kept a close accounting of exactly what crews were there, so the utility could more efficiently reconcile invoices and document costs if a rate case were required.
“In an event, ICS creates significant opportunities in terms of emergency management finances, and human impact,” says Hurley. For example, the ICS model includes establishing logistics, planning and operations sections. Assigning a hospitality lead within the logistics section means there is someone responsible for managing bed needs, and has oversight of hotel rooms, bunk trailers and spaces for cots across gymnasium floors. In Hurley’s experience, this is important not only because it ensures that personnel and contractors have a place to rest, but financially limits reserving rooms that go unused, which could run into the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per day. In turn, it makes what would have been unused rooms available to individuals and families in need of temporary shelter.
Richard Mroz was president of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities from 2014-2018, and worked with Hurley when FirstEnergy instituted its system. He credits the company with making, “fairly dramatic changes in the way it responded to emergency events, and generally across the board had a renewed emphasis on being responsive and forthright, sharing accurate information, and having a more robust system to communicate with customers.”
A flexible, modular system
“ICS sets up an organization to be successful in managing storms,” says Doug Hiatt, who has supported incident command systems for AEP and Consumers Energy. Hurley agrees, noting that the versatility of the system is built in during its design phase.
For utility managers who want to ramp up an ICS program or vet an existing structure, consider these questions:
- Are you prioritizing? Is storm response assigned to different utility leaders based upon who’s on duty when an event strikes? If storm response isn’t a leader’s regular job, they can get bogged down in operational details like overseeing travel and accommodations for storm response crews. ICS spurs a utility to appoint a single incident commander who delegates to a team trained in specific functional areas (e.g., operations, planning, finance, logistics, communications, etc.). Does your incident commander have a team trained in all ICS functions, and can he or she expand the team for the size and kind of event?
“[ICS] allows the leadership to put attention on important things, such as the safety of the public, and the safety of employees,” says Hiatt.
- Have you standardized roles? How are you accessing and plugging in additional support from across your organization when needed? As Hurley describes it, these are, “people who specialize in their area and all work together.” This creates less stress on the system because there is a clear division of responsibility, and the incident commander has access to a team of people who can run each element of the storm response. Moreover, the functional roles within, say, the logistics section’s facilities, food, and ground units are similar across utilities using ICS, which facilitates mutual assistance.
- What’s your system for communicating? Is your team’s progress continually updated through a system of internal communications? With ICS, managers can establish and track objectives and deadlines to facilitate consistent communications for those working on an event as well as with the public, regulators, and local, state and federal officials. Everyone knows the extent of the issue and when they can expect power to be restored. This includes using similar language in coordinating with police, fire departments and other emergency responders. In his experience, Hurley will embed a public communications officer as part of the ICS protocol. “If the process is working, everyone is speaking with one voice,” says Hiatt.
- Are you continuously improving? The systematic approach provided by ICS allows utilities to develop training materials on programs such as SharePoint that managers can continually update to include learnings from each event. This enables team members to stay current in their knowledge, cross-train in other functions, and be briefed and refreshed on ICS practices when emergencies happen.
ICS a living process
When a utility’s ICS processes are working, “the beauty is that it provides a structure for you to manage complicated restoration events more efficiently and in a more consistent way across all the areas,” says Steve Owens, an electric industry consultant who previously was the director of distribution operations for Westar Energy (now Evergy).
According to Owens, utilities that already put ICS in place may not be keeping their practices current or could be mistakenly relying on technology as a “magical fix when it’s not.” For example, while he recognizes that technology is necessary and can help by tracking such things as outages and workflow, it should be applied in ways that are useful to the ICS process. Says Owens, “ICS is a management approach to emergency response that creates clear objectives, establishes a hierarchy of management, and divvies up the work. If you do those things well, and use technology tools to do that effectively, then you’ll be as good as you can be.”
Owens cautions that some utilities may have only the “veneer of ICS,” and managers should evaluate their programs to ensure they are robust in the event of an emergency. In addition, he notes that some smaller and municipal utilities may not use the approach because of concerns about cost. If that’s the case, managers at these utilities should contact their counterparts at larger utility companies that have already blazed the trail and learn about the efficiencies they’ve identified.
Hurley points out there is no ICS certification, and that utilities need to stay true to the system’s core principles to accurately claim they are ICS compliant, including in their dealings with regulators. There are numerous resources available to utility managers who want to learn more about ICS, such as free courses available through FEMA, and additional information and training available from EMSI and the All Hazards Consortium.
“We come from a culture of taking an all-hazards approach and having a robust emergency response protocol in place,” adds Mroz. “And where there isn’t, for policymakers and regulators embracing this as a standard or best practice, it is worth reinforcing for the regulator to encourage it and the industry to adopt it.”
About the author
Scott Chambers is director of program management for Tempest Utility Consulting, which helps utilities efficiently manage key aspects of their operations, including project and safety programs, construction and field services, and emergency storm support. TUC is part of the Tempest family of companies. Chambers’ experience includes working with the AEP companies to design and implement ICS. He earned his bachelor’s degree from West Virginia Institute of Technology and master’s degree from Marshall University. Contact him at [email protected].
